Snow: the Draco treatment

A little background to start off: Draco Malfoy is a character from Harry Potter. Both in the books and movies, Draco is portrayed as being a cowardly, spoiled bully. But fans ignore this characterization because his actor (Tom Felton) is hot. Instead of being cowardly, he’s a hardened badass. Instead of being spoiled, he’s abused. Instead of being a bully, he’s just snarky and misunderstood. Basically, his entire characterization gets thrown out to make him the typical brooding, misunderstood bad boy that’s secretly deep and angsty.

What I’ve noticed is that this exact thing is happening to Snow now that we’ve seen him be played by (very attractive) Tom Blythe. I see so many takes now that say he was remorseful about his actions, he wasn’t that bad a guy, he truly loved Lucy Gray, it’s her fault for “threatening” him towards the end, etc. Anything that makes him less of a monster/more sympathetic so it’s easier to thirst over him. Draco gets more of an edge to him to make him hotter, and Snow gets his edge sanded down to make him more human. They’re both brought to that perfect, bad boy middle ground.

But that totally ruins the characterization. Snow’s goal is to land on top by any means necessary - he’s unapologetic about what it takes to get there. He views Lucy Gray as almost subhuman, an object that he owns rather than a person. His breakdown towards the end is a result of his own declining mental state, not any threat Lucy Gray makes. The book does a very good job of putting you in his headspace and seeing the way he views the world imo. I think he’s a great character, but he’s being interpreted as Generic Bad Boy #437.

Part of that is a given due to Tom Blythe’s attractiveness. Can’t be helped. But I think the movie waters down Snow a lot, simply because we can’t read his internal monologue. I’ve seen people argue that this is a mark of how well the movie did. The thought process behind that is: without his internal monologue, Snow is meant to be charming, so if the audience is charmed, then they’ve been fooled by Snow, just like everyone else. I have trouble agreeing with that, though. Snow’s possessiveness, prejudice, and disregard for others are all huge parts of his character. If that isn’t translating on screen, then chunks of his character are being missed. The audience only knows what they see, so they’re not going to know that they’ve been fooled. They’re just going to think he’s not that bad and leave it at that (unless they read the books).

I went to see it with a friend who hadn’t read the books. She said the end confused her cause “he was in love with her, why did he randomly start acting like that?” I thought maybe it was just my friend, but anytime I see people talk about the movie online it’s “the ending didn’t make sense,” “Snow and Lucy Gray loved each other more than Peeta and Katniss,” “I didn’t know he was a villain until the end.”